The Science Policy IRL series pulls back the curtain on who does what in science policy and how they shaped their career path. In previous episodes we’ve looked at the cosmology of science policy through the eyes of people who work at federal agencies and the National Academies, but this time we are exploring think tanks. 

Walter Valdivia describes how a chance encounter while he was getting a PhD in public policy at Arizona State University led him into science policy. Since then he’s worked at think tanks including Brookings and the Mercatus Center and is now at the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which does research for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this episode, we’ll talk to Walter about what think tanks do in the policy world and how policy sometimes creates inherent paradoxes. 

Resources: 

Visit the Institute for Defense Analysis’ Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to learn more about Walter’s current work. 

Check out the book, Between Politics and Science by David Guston, to see what inspired Walter’s career in science policy. Here is the first chapter.

Visit the Center for Nanotechnology in Society’s website. 

Read Walter and David Guston’s paper, “Responsible innovation: A primer for policymakers.”

Read “Is Patent Protection Industrial Policy?” to learn more about policy paradoxes. 

Check out The Honest Broker by Roger Pielke, Jr. to learn more about the role of impartial expertise. 

Interested in learning more about Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)? Read this primer.

At the age of 19, Monique Verdin picked up a camera and began documenting the lives of her relatives in the Mississippi Delta. Little did she know that she would spend the next two decades investigating and capturing the profound ways that climate, the fossil fuel industry, and the shifting waters of the Gulf of Mexico would transform the landscape that was once a refuge for her Houma ancestors.

Based in Louisiana, Verdin is an artist, storyteller, videographer, and photographer, as well as a community builder and activist. She is also the director of the Land Memory Bank and Seed Exchange, a project that seeks to create a community record of the coastal cultures and native ecology of southeast Louisiana. Her work, which was featured in the Winter print edition of Issues, seeks to understand home and belonging after displacement and migration. Her stories are laced with environmental concerns, the shifting roles of corporate entities, and natural and human-made disasters. Verdin’s art practice creates space and gives voice to Indigenous and marginalized communities in the South while building bridges with science communities.

On this episode, Verdin joins host JD Talasek to talk about using art and science to understand a Gulf that is being reshaped by climate, industry, and more.

Resources:

A lawyer and bioethicist by training, Alta Charo has decades of experience in helping to formulate and inform science policy on new and emerging technologies, including stem cells, cloning, CRISPR, and chimeras. The Warren P. Knowles Professor Emerita of Law and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, she served on President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Commission, was a member of President Obama’s transition team, was an advisor for the Food and Drug Administration, and served on more than a dozen study committees for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 

In the fourth episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Alta joins Issues contributing editor Molly Galvin to explore how science policy can and does impact people’s lives in real and profound ways. She also describes what it’s like to be one of the only non-scientists at the science policy table, how helping a close friend who died of ALS continues to inspire her work, and why science policy can help us become techno optimists. 

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at [email protected], or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources:

National Academies Collection on Stem Cell Research

Institute of Medicine. 2005. Review of the HIVNET 012 Perinatal HIV Prevention Study

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and National Academy of Medicine. 2023. Toward Equitable Innovation in Health and Medicine: A Framework

National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2017. Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance

The Issues Interview: Alta Charo

Previous episodes of Science Policy IRL

Zach Pirtle Explores Ethics for Mars Landings

Apurva Dave Builds Connections Between National Security and Climate

Quinn Spadola Develops Nanotechnology With Soft Power

NASA’s Artemis project aims to establish a long-term human presence on the moon—and then put astronauts on Mars. So in addition to designing rockets and spacesuits, NASA is also exploring the ethical and societal implications of living in space. In the third episode of our Science Policy IRL series, Zach Pirtle, who got his undergraduate degrees in engineering and philosophy at Arizona State University, explains how he came to work in the agency’s Office of Technology Policy and Strategy, where he recently organized a seminar on space ethics. He also works as a program executive within the Science Mission Directorate working on commercial lunar payload services. Zach joins Issues editor-in-chief Lisa Margonelli to talk about how he almost accidentally found his way to a perfect career, and how agencies engage hands-on in science policy as they figure out how to implement legislation.

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore? Let us know by emailing us at [email protected], or by tagging us on social media with the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources:

By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them. 

The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.

Resources

Early in his career, Apurva Dave was an oceanographer; now he works at the cutting edge of climate policy at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. As the director of the Academies’ Climate Security Roundtable, he convenes cross-disciplinary dialogues on “emerging, abrupt, and understudied risks” at the nexus of climate change and national security.  In this second episode in our Science Policy IRL series, Apurva joins senior editor Megan Nicholson to talk about his nonlinear path to this role, and how his hesitancy to specialize has helped him think about the complexities of interconnectedness in science and policy. 

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore?  Let us know by emailing us at [email protected], or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL.

Resources: 

Stuart Buck has referred to himself as a venture capitalist for making science more efficient, reliable, and accountable. As vice president at the policy-focused philanthropy Arnold Ventures, he directed funds toward fledgling enterprises that are now major forces shaping scientific norms and infrastructure, including the Center for Open Science and Retraction Watch. He’s now executive director of the Good Science Project, a nonprofit organization working to figure out effective ways to improve science.

Buck considers how to make sure that reforms are actually improvements, not performative busywork. He explores what sorts of entities are required to push for positive change in science and still respect the different cultures and practices in various countries and disciplines. It’s not enough to assess scientific practices, he argues; there needs to be a built-in way to assess scientific reforms, including the relative costs and benefits of increasingly popular policies like sharing data and promoting transparency.

In this context, Buck joins host Monya Baker to discuss how metascience—the study of science—has fueled reform, and how to make sure reforms produce the desired effects.

Resources:

Since 1984, Issues in Science and Technology has been a journal for science policy—a space to discuss how to best use science for the benefit of society. But what is science policy, exactly? Our new podcast series, Science Policy IRL, explores what science policy is and how it gets done. “Science” is often caricatured as a lone person in a lab, but the work of science is supported by a community of people who engineer its funding, goals, coordination, and dissemination. They include people in legislative offices, federal agencies, national labs, universities, the National Academies, industry, and think tanks—not to mention interest groups and lobbyists.  In this series, we will explore the work of science policy by speaking to people who have built careers in it.

For the first episode in this series, host Lisa Margonelli is joined by Quinn Spadola, the deputy director of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office, a unique office that coordinates the development of nanotechnology across the entire federal government. Spadola, who has a Ph.D. in physics from Arizona State University,  now uses “soft power” to bring groups together to coordinate their efforts so that taxpayers get the most from their investments in science. In practice, she brings all of her life experiences to bear on the task of shaping technology so that it benefits society. 

Is there something about science policy you’d like us to explore?  Let us know by emailing us at [email protected], or by tagging us on social media using the hashtag #SciencePolicyIRL. 

Resources

On science policy:

- Harvey Brooks, “Knowledge and Action: The Dilemma of Science Policy in the ’70s,” Daedalus 102, no. 2 (Spring 1973): 125–143.

- Deborah D. Stine “Science and Technology Policymaking: A Primer,” Congressional Research Service, RL34454 (May 27, 2009). 

On nanotechnology:

- The website of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office.

- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, A Quadrennial Review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative: Nanoscience, Applications, and Commercialization (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.17226/25729.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of scientists fled the country and hundreds more remained behind. Those scientists who stayed are trying to continue their research and engage with the global scientific community under often difficult circumstances, with the ultimate goal of being able to help rebuild Ukraine when the war ends. 

Since the early days of the war, Vaughan Turekian, the director of the Policy and Global Affairs Division of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, has been leading efforts to support Ukrainian scientists and their research, enlisting the help of international science academies and philanthropic partners. Turekian has spent much of his career in science diplomacy. Before joining the Academies, he served as the fifth science and technology advisor to US Secretary of State John Kerry and was also the founding director of the Center for Science Diplomacy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

In this episode, recorded on October 5, Turekian joins host Molly Galvin to discuss efforts to support Ukrainian scientists and why such efforts are important for the future of Ukraine. 

Resources

National Academies, “Supporting Ukraine’s Scientists, Engineers, and Health Care Workers.”

Interview with the president of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Jerzy Duszyński, “What I’m Mostly Afraid of Is That There Will Be Two Sciences—Democratic Science and Autocratic Science,” (Issues, Summer 2022).

Daniel Armanios, Jonas Skovrup Christensen, and Andriy Tymoshenko, “What Ukraine can Teach the World About Resilience and Civil Engineering” (Issues, Fall 2023).

The Green Revolution was a program of agricultural technology transfer that helped poor countries around the world increase food production from the 1950s onward. An American agronomist named Norman Borlaug developed and popularized the central innovation of this revolution: the concept of “wide adaptation,” or the idea that plants could be bred to produce a high yield in a variety of environments, rather than in a particular region.

Borlaug’s work won him the Nobel Prize in 1970, and his agricultural insights are often credited with saving millions of people from hunger. But the legacy of Borlaug and the Green Revolution is not as straightforward as these accolades suggest. 

In this episode, we caught up with interdisciplinary scientist and historian Marci Baranski to discuss her new book, The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution. She talks with host Jason Lloyd about how a more nuanced understanding of the Green Revolution and Borlaug’s work can improve agricultural and economic development policies today.

Resources: